Jan 21, 2015

#FreeSpeechIsForWhiteMen

Today is the anniversary of the death of George Orwell, so
it seems like a good day to tackle a topic that he is famous for defending:
free speech.

I’ve never read much Orwell, I must confess. Donnish and,
despite his internationalist aspirations, unremittingly English, he is not as
revered outside the English speaking world as he is within it. If you asked the
average French person who their emblem of freedom of expression was, they're much more likely to say Voltaire. Were you to pose such a question to a Russian
intellectual, they may very well say Solzhenitsyn. Or Vysotsky, as like as not.
Or “what is this free speech you speak of”.

It happens also that today is when the always hotly anticipated satirical news magazine Private Eye's latest cover comes out, and this is the image they’ve gone with:

Oh, those rascally World Leaders! So hypocritical in their
solidarity with the French Nation after the massacre of free-thinking,
free-wheeling satirists, when in their own country they imprison and kill
journalists themselves! How comical! Let’s all be wry and cynical about it in
the best tradition of English humour!

Funny, that (not funny ha-ha): that this joke is coming from such a
very English publication. After all, similar criticism could have been leveled
at the assembled country heads from the Asian-British humourous weekly, or the feminist
Viz, or the… Oh wait. There is no Muslim Private Eye. No Arab Charlie Hebdo. No Afro-European Viz, no Feminist Rory Bremner, no Orthodox
Jewish (or, God forbid, Zionist!) Voltaire poking fun at the post-WWII pieties
of a prosperous Western Europe, sanguine in the knowledge that we’ve done the
Holocaust now, it’s so 20th century darling, We Shall Remember and It Will Never
Happen Again.

One does rather wonder. Well, no, actually, one really doesn’t.
White men have the vast majority of the money, power, influence and education
on this continent (sorry Brits, I’m lumping you in). They always have done. They
get to say what goes, and frankly they get to say what’s funny, too. And even
if it were to so happen that an Afro-French comedian were to amass the money,
the following, the influence and the media visibility to really start taking
the piss, well then he’d just… What’s that? Get arrested, you say? Barely days
after the whole world was up in arms about freedom of speech & how
important the French tradition of irreverent humour was? Surely not!

I’m Jewish, which means there’s not really much love lost
between myself and Dieudonne M’bala M’bala. Frankly, he creeps me out. But I am
unquiet to a degree unmatched by the many self appointed (male, white)
champions of freedom of expression that France is expiating its Dreyfus &Vichy guilt on his particular African back. Like, thanks and all that, but no
thanks. I’ll handle my own anti-Semitic comedians – the nice gentlemen of the
security service could perhaps better employ their time providing Hebdo-style
round-the-clock security to my sisters who are speaking truth to male power and encountering
the terrifying Heckler’s Veto of death threats backed up by publication of
their own and their families’ addresses, employment details and banking
information.

It’s not as if women in aren’t killed by men on any given day,
is it. Or for that matter, it’s not as if Muslims aren’t killed by drones,
occupying armies and so called “peace-keeping” forces sent by the West, like, all the time. Atleast 160 by just this one guy, according to a Clint Eastwood flick that opened "surprisingly strongly" at the weekend despite being the most blatant, virulent
anti-Muslim propaganda seen in years. And Clint wasn’t even trying to be funny.
Why, one wonders, aren’t Iraqis living in the US provided with NSA bodyguards?!
I’d sure want one of I were them!

But then again America is a law unto itself, with its constitutionally enshrined free
speech and its tradition of free press and its absence of laws
banning any kind of speech or expression. I mean yes, if you’re a black
protester holding his hands up and chanting “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot”, then the
police will tear gas and arrest you. And you’ll get called a terrorist by
people on TV. And your protest will be reported as if it hadbeen a riot. But look, if you’re a large corporation run by white men, then
your freedom of speech is protected by the Supreme Court, so it’s all good,
right? Freedom of speech is obviously A Thing! That exists! And people have it!

Yesterday I saw this news item in passing, about a teenager
arrested in France for sharing this spoof Charlie Hebdo cover (I have my own suspicions about what colour teenager that was):

I thought it was rather good, mostly because, unlike almost
all the Charlie Hebdo cartoons I’ve hitherto seen, it’s actually funny (especially in context). Freedom
of speech, it says, is no protection against actual violence. The pen is not
literally mightier than the submachine gun. And as if to prove the point, the
lovely chaps of the Nantes constabulary hauled in this kid for sharing this on Facebook.

I mean, c’mmon. The double standard here is so
eye-bleedingly blatant I can’t even find words to write about it. It seems so thumpingly
obvious that freedom of speech must be extended to all lest it be functionally withheld
from all that I actually don’t know how to bring this paragraph to a close now.

Except, I guess, to say this. If, in the immediate aftermath
of the Charlie Hebdo murders, your instinct was to mount an impassioned defence
of the right to offend in the name of freedom of speech, then you weren’t only defending
an ideal: you were also defending a status quo. And in that status quo, actual freedom to speak is not an equally distributed resource: rich
white men like Rush Limbaugh and Nigel Farage have it, and
pretty much everybody else doesn’t.

Satirical magazines like Charlie Hebdo and
Private Eye stand for that status quo at least as much as they stand for the
principle which they nominally embody. I’m sure the men who run these
publications are perfectly nice liberal guys who think that freedom of speech
is a splendid thing, Orwell, Voltaire, yaddah yaddah. But this doesn’t change
the fact that they are heard that much more loudly and clearly against the
background of silence from all the people who are not them.